gems, corundum, Afghanistan.12, Tajikistan.12, spinel, lapis lazuli, ruby, sapphire, clinohumite

Forty years ago, Elena Abramovna Davidovich and I succeeded in definitively establishing the location of the medieval capital of Khuttal, the city of Khulbuk—at the site of Khisht-tepe in the village of Kurban-Shaid, Vose District, Kulyab Region. With enormous enthusiasm, our team excavated the palace of the rulers of Khuttal. Among the members of the team was a very young, slender girl—Mira Bubnova. This was one of her first archaeological field excavations. Even then, her serious interest in the past and her determination attracted attention. During that distant excavation season, M. Bubnova successfully mastered the fundamentals of archaeological field techniques. Later, after completing her studies at Tajik State University, she eventually left for Leningrad to continue her postgraduate studies at the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Archaeology. It was there that the principal direction of M. A. Bubnova’s scholarly interests was finally established—medieval archaeology of Central Asia and, specifically, the history of mining. She collected material on this subject during numerous expeditions conducted in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. She was not starting from nothing: much had already been accomplished by the founder of this field in Central Asian archaeology, M. E. Masson, who had begun studying these problems in the late 1920s. The contribution of the Orientalist and historian P. P. Ivanov was considerable. By that time I myself had published a number of works on the subject, and I therefore welcomed M. A. Bubnova’s interest in it with great enthusiasm. There were, however, sceptics—the subject had traditionally been regarded as “men’s work”. But they were soon proved wrong…. M. A. Bubnova found her own approach to the medieval history of mining and metallurgy, the essence of which was an integrated study in which archaeological and written sources were analysed from the standpoint of modern metallurgical and chemical sciences, using their methods. As a result, for the first time she succeeded in reconstructing the processes by which medieval metallurgists extracted silver from ores.